When I first mentioned last week that I was attempting a homemade version of Nutella, a twitter friend said I was going too far. Oh, how does his lovely wife Michele live his incessant teasing? They are a very cute couple, by the way, and I'm so glad to have met them in person last year.
Ah, but I've gotten off track, and so soon into this post. That may be a record for me. Alas, my goal in making my own nutella wasn't to improve upon the original recipe. And when I say original, I mean the one in the glass jars that are imported from Italy, not the plastic containers made domestically in the U.S.—they used to contain HFCS, and while that ingredient has been removed it still is made with palm oil. My goal was to simply recreate the recipe as stated on the label of those glass jars I'd been paying $5.79 for to support Isabella's habit.
Well, at least that was my original intent. Of course, I decided to push the envelope, and we'll see what Chef John has to say about it. The ingredient list is short, and um...sweet: zucchero (sugar), olio vegetale (vegetable oil), nocciole (hazelnuts), cocoa magro (which translates to thin cocoa, which I interpreted to mean cocoa powder) and from here there are three more ingredients with very funny literal translations, but they're basically powdered whole milk, powdered skim milk, emulsifiers and flavoring.
What that translated to in my Italian-American kitchen was confectioners' sugar, hazelnuts, melted chocolate, cocoa powder, vanilla bean seeds, and a few drops, I really mean just a scant amount, of vegetable oil—for an ultra smooth spreading consistency.
Here's where I may have gone too far. I was going to use Scharffen Berger cocoa powder. But right next to it on my pantry shelf was that alluring dark box of Valrhona cocoa. It's as if it was batting its eyelashes, saying "you know you want me".
I caved.
Then there's the matter of the chocolate. I could've used milk chocolate, which would've better recreated the exact flavor.
I could've. But I didn't.
I used some Guittard 55% chocolate wafers. The resulting flavor is a quite decadent treat, as if Nutella in itself doesn't scream decadence spread on toast...for breakfast. Back when I was in middle school—I believe my daughter thinks that's when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we used to rent an apartment from an Italian family. I was always jealous of their morning Nutella ritual but my mother said chocolate wasn't for breakfast.
Now that I'm a grown up, I can have it whenever I want. I also get to be a pretty cool mom when I let the kid have a tiny smear on toast before she goes off to school—hey, it's whole wheat bread and it gets her to eat something in the morning, as well as drink a big glass of milk.
So, while this recipe is richer and has a deeper chocolate flavor, it's pretty darn good and kid approved. If you really want to be a purist and crave more of that creamy, milk chocolate undertone, by all means swap in milk chocolate discs and regular cocoa. Trust me you won't be disappointed by either version.
Originally published March 2010